Overview
When Steven Soderbergh (Magic Mike's Last Dance) and David Koepp (Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny) work together, someone on-screen is watching on, listening in or both. With the former helming and the latter penning the screenplays, the veteran filmmakers have joined forces on three features so far: 2022's Kimi, as well as the 2025 duo of Presence and Black Bag. Surveillance plays a pivotal part in each. The first of their collaborations focused on an always-eavesdropping smart speaker, plus the company employee who hears something sinister in its audio streams. The third of their shared projects is a spy thriller that hits cinemas in March 2025. Then there's the duo's ghost story, about a family who moves into a home with an otherworldly existing resident.
In Presence, the titular entity is indeed peering on and pricking up its ears. How does this ever-prolific pair, whose careers both date back to separate debut movies that screened at the 1989 Sundance Film Festival — Soderbergh's Sex, Lies, and Videotape and the Koepp-scripted Apartment Zero — not only take on the horror-genre staple that is haunted houses, but give it a new perspective? The answer is that very perspective. Presence adopts the viewpoint of the body doing the spooking, which means that the picture's sound and vision presents what its ghost sees and hears. For viewers, there's no question whether there's a spirit lingering about; that's clear immediately.
The film's four key humans — matriarch Rebekah (Lucy Liu, Red One), her husband Chris (Chris Sullivan, a veteran of Soderbergh's excellent TV series The Knick), and their teenage children Chloe (Callina Liang, Foundation) and Tyler (debutant Eddy Maday) — aren't as clued in as the audience when Presence begins. They've simply relocated to a new house in the suburbs and are endeavouring to go about their daily lives. The ghost is there before them. It watches on as they navigate dinners, fights, secrets, romances and everything in-between. It spots how Rebekah favours Tyler, and only Chris treats Chloe with kindness. And soon, it starts to make its presence known.
Soderbergh came to Koepp about Presence with the basics: "a handful of pages and a strong aesthetic concept," Koepp tells Concrete Playground. From there, for a director who also lensed and edited the film himself — and therefore, as the cinematographer, basically plays the ghost himself — the screenwriter fleshed out a narrative that's as much as family drama as a haunted-house flick. He's working with elements that he loves, and it both shows and pays off, as does the immersive, patient, long-take ghost's-eye camerawork. Koepp has both Stir of Echoes and Ghost Town on his resume, two other tales of haunting entities that he directed. He's no stranger to one-location setups, either, writing David Fincher's Panic Room.
Real life was partly an inspiration for Presence, after strange things started happening in Soderbergh's own Los Angeles home, where he knew that someone had died before he moved in. Koepp has had his own encounter with odd occurrences that could possibly be chalked up to the supernatural — but he also knows the thrill that can and does spring from choosing to believe that something ghostly has happened. Building that feeling in, and also the 'has it/hasn't it?' sensation that everyone has had at least when a door swings open or an item has moved unexpectedly, is also one of his Presence feats.
Koepp might find excitement and even a dash of optimism in Presence's concept, but that isn't the case with his other surveillance-heavy films with Soderbergh. "I think with a ghost story, yes," he advises. "But I don't find the idea that someone's watching or listening to be hopeful. I find it to be creepy." He continues: "And it's that sense of paranoia is what we're very consciously playing on. Certainly in Kimi. We're right. We've given permission to these devices to just listen to everything we say and do. Everybody's had the feeling of 'hey, I was just talking about Philadelphia, and now my phone is suggesting hotels in Philadelphia'. Well, there's a reason for that. You're not crazy."
"And in this, those same feelings of unease — maybe even in this case dread — were things we wanted to play with."
Two movies hitting cinemas within two months would be huge for most screenwriters. Koepp also has a third film on its way to picture palaces mid-2025: Jurassic World Rebirth, which sees him return to the franchise after co-penning the OG Jurassic Park script and The Lost World: Jurassic Park, both for Steven Spielberg. His resume highlights go on; Carlito's Way, the first Mission: Impossible, 2002's Spider-Man and Spielberg's War of the Worlds are all on Koepp's filmography, too, and represent just a selection of his wide-ranging array of projects. We also chatted with the Presence scribe about the intimacy of ghost stories, wanting to believe, working with a director who shoots and edits his pictures himself, the variety of films across his busy career and more.
On the Intimacy of Ghost Stories — Including When a Haunted-House Film Is a Family Drama Shot From the Ghost's Perspective
"Yes, as you point out, ghost stories are really intimate. I've done other ghost stories. I've done one that's meant to be scary, a comedy and this, and I often notice that in most stories, the person who is able to perceive the ghost is usually in some kind of difficult situation in their home life. And that's probably just because that's what makes for drama. You don't want to pick somebody who has everything going well.
But I had this theory that perhaps that's also because having experienced a trauma opens you up to be more sensitive to things you couldn't perceive before.
I know that there have been periods in my own life when I've gone through things I'd describe now as traumatic, and I felt much more in tune with the emotions of the people around me, because you're just opened up to the world in that way. And I thought 'if you're opened up to the world, why not the other world?'."
On Using Real Life as a Starting Point — and Toying with the Excitement of Wanting to Believe
"I think that with all of us personally — I can't speak to Steven's experience, but I know in my own, it's something that may or may not have happened, but I really wanted it to have happened. Because who doesn't want to believe these things? And because the very notion of believing in a ghost is optimistic, in that you believe there's something after we die. Who doesn't want to believe that?
In Chloe's case, it quickly becomes pretty inarguable. The books were on the bed. The books are now not on the bed. And I guess she can question herself a little bit, but she's not an older person who can say 'oh, I forgot' — she is 16 years old. She knows very well where she left the books.
But I do think that most of us who think something like that happened, it's terribly exciting and interesting. Why wouldn't we want it to have happened? And Chloe even says it to her brother later, she says 'can't part of you admit that this is the most-interesting thing that's ever happened in your life? Are you that scared of it that you can't admit that?'."
On Writing for a Ghost — and, for a Ghost Basically Played by Steven Soderbergh as Presence's Cameraman
"When I first said 'okay, let's do this' and I laid out the story, and then when I started writing it, at first I thought 'oh, this is going to be terribly limiting' — because I'm writing a four-character piece, but I can't ever cut. I can't, if I need a close-up of something, I can't. If I need a reverse, I can't. If I want to suddenly see another character's face for impact, I can't. I can't intercut between locations for suspense.
All these tools that are usually available in writing for cinema were now off limits, and I thought 'how limiting'.
Then I realised just a few pages into the writing 'no, no, no, you're not writing a four-character piece — you're writing a five-character piece. The fifth character is the presence, and it's played by the camera'.
So when I embraced the presence as a character, it could then have feelings and that dictated what happened. It's anxious. It's restless. We know it's kind of fearful because it retreats into the closet frequently. So that made everything much easier, because now I'm writing for a character and I know how to do that."
On Penning a Screenplay for a Film That Audiences Will See Differently the Second Time Around
"I know everything before I go in, because I've outlined and I've written a summary of it, so I have a good idea who it is and what they're doing. So I'm dropping clues throughout — and there are a number of clues in the body of the film.
From a character standpoint, knowing who the presence is and knowing some specifics about them tells me how they would behave.
So I think I'm gratified by how many people fully understood it the first time. And I think it does reward a second viewing in that you see all the signposts that were there for you along the way."
On the Importance of Presence Being a Film About a Family Struggling as Much as It Is a Haunted-House Film
"That was what made it fun. When Steven told me the idea, he said it all needs to be in one house — I mean the aesthetic idea — he said it all needs to be in one house, and I'd like it to be a family. And it hit three of my top boxes for things that I'm interested in writing.
It had a strong concept behind it that limited us in some way, and therefore freed us up or forced us into creative solutions. It was all set in a house. I like stories like that. I've done a few of them. Panic Room some years ago, all in one house. And it was a family drama.
And one of the things that I like about the big resurgence in horror films in the last ten or 15 or 20 years, I don't know how long it's been now, is that you can you can smuggle in other kinds of stories in the box of a spooky movie.
And so I love writing families. I have four kids, I've known a lot of families. We all have our birth families, and if we're lucky enough to have kids, we know that family — and they're very dynamic groups. And it was great fun to be able to write a family drama."
On What Keeps Drawing Koepp to Two of Presence's Key Elements: Ghost Stories and One-Location Films
"I don't know psychologically, but I do know practically. I call them bottles, in that there's a container for your wine — and much like the Hays Code of the Hollywood in the 30s, 40s and 50s had very strict rules about what you could do and what you couldn't do in terms of sex and innuendo, so the filmmakers were left to think of ways around it and clever ways to insinuate. And I think when you say 'okay, we can't leave the house', then you're compelled to think of creative solutions to your problems.
And 'how do I make this interesting even though I'm stuck in this house for the whole movie?'. And 'how do I make that an advantage instead of a disadvantage?'.
For me, when you sit down to write something, there's a sense that the world is too big. If you can go anywhere and have them do anything and have absolutely anyone be in it, where do you even begin? It just makes me want to take a nap. But when I'm limited in terms of who can be in it and where they can be, now suddenly I feel like I'm starting to have ideas.
I think da Vinci — I don't want to be too highfalutin, but I think Leonardo da Vinci said that all great art is born out of limitation. I'm not saying we're great art, but I think he's right about that."
On the Collaborative Process When Working with a Filmmaker Who Directs, Shoots and Edits — as Soderbergh Does on Kimi and Presence
"Well, it's particular to the person. All the great directors I've worked with are very hands-on. They don't all do as many jobs as Steven does, shooting it and editing it.
Confident people are easier to work with than people who lack confidence. And Steven is extremely confident and extremely decisive. And therefore, he lets other people do their jobs.
I know he can do my job. He's an accomplished writer. So I assume if he wanted to, he'd be doing it. He would write it himself — the way he wants to shoot and he wants to edit, so he takes those jobs himself.
So I think I appreciate that he guides me, but doesn't try to do it for me."
On Jumping Between Indie Films and Blockbusters, Movies and TV, and Screenwriting and Directing Across Koepp's Career
"It's what keeps it interesting. I continue to like all kinds of movies. I'll see pretty much anything in the cinema. So I like to try my hand at writing them.
And I have this theory that it's like lifting weights. You're supposed to exercise your muscles to the point of failure. I feel like I've tried to exercise my creative muscles across genres to the point of failure — and I have failed.
So you find 'oh, I wish I could do that particular type of movie' — turns out I'm not that great at it. But that's what keeps it interesting.
You have to continually try different things. And you have to stay in service to the idea. If you have an idea, you can't try to bend it into the kind of film you're comfortable with. You need to become comfortable with the kind of film that the idea demands."
Presence opened in cinemas Down Under on Thursday, February 6, 2025.